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After a development period longer than that required for a NASA space station, the Labour Party has put its English-lengwigg website back on line. It has ditched the reds and gone for shades of blue and grey instead (I wonder why).
This is my ABSOLUTE favourite bit, from its leading article today:
“We do not need a Finance Minister to tell us what we should do with our own money. The people have spoken. Give to Ceasar what is Ceasar’s, but give to the people what belongs to the people.”
Shame they haven’t spent any money on a sub or proofreader, and are using those elves instead. I imagine Kurt Farrugia, or whoever’s running this particular show now, goes to the sort of outfit which serves ‘Ceasar salad’.
A handy note for the elves, which will help them remember how this one is spelled. The English (mis)pronunciation of Caesar does not reflect the original Latin pronunciation, which gave the German language ‘Kaiser’ and was corrupted into the Russian ‘tsar’. The fact that in English it is pronounced like the verb ‘cease’ does not mean that this is how it is spelled. When you need to remember whether the ‘a’ comes before the ‘e’, think of the German pronunciation.
Fussy? Not at all. It makes me really nervous to think that the flagship news portal of Malta’s alternative government is edited by somebody with the level of education of a compiler of Bugibba restaurant menus.
Also, I notice that ‘the people have spoken’ has become the latest buzz-phrase for Joseph Muscat, his Labour Party, their elves, Astrid Vella, her FAA, James Tyrell (who claims he is a tourist who lives in Northern Ireland, when he has a home in Gozo and an obsessive interest in what goes on here – perhaps to keep the tax-man off his back?), and now even, and ludicrously, that unlikely representative of the people, Peter Apap Bologna.
Half of them missed the hippy days of revolution and flower power, and so just don’t get how farcical they sound, and the other half are desperately trying to relive what they never lived in the first place, even though they were there. “The people have spoken” – qisna f’xi Prague Spring, hej. Watch out for those Russian tanks, man, and take care you don’t trip over those love-beads.
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Well done Maltastar’s Fabrizio Ellul for this well-written and detailed Maltastar article: ” http://www.maltastar.com/pages/ms09dart.asp?a=338 “
Indeed, Pulitzer material.
Why oh why do these cretins continue to demonstrate their incompetence?
By the way, I was at Woodstock, long hair, beard, toked-out, once in a lifetime experience. Still sane. (I think).
[Daphne – I am SO JEALOUS! The last time I was asked what I would choose if I were given a once-only opportunity to go back in time for a really short while, I said I wanted to be at Woodstock when Jimi Hendrix did his bit.]
Surely the sick man (eczema?) and the man with the injured arm need medical attention. On the other hand I cannot understand why MSF abandoned their mission here in Malta. And well done Fabrizio Ellul. Daphne is teaching Latin now: “sum, est, est, sumus, estis, sunt. And what is the ablative of means…..?”
[Daphne – Actually, that was a lesson in English spelling, not in Latin. My view is that if you’re going to run a ‘news’ portal in the English language, especially if you are the country’s alternative government, you had better make damned sure your spelling and grammar are as near-perfect as possible. Ceasar indeed.]
I find that the little Latin I learned at school helps in English spelling.
@ Harry Purdie: was there a guitarist with a name Lou Bondy at Woodstock? I am not joking.
[Daphne – You use Latin to help with spelling English? That figures. Your question to Harry: no, there was a singer called Lou Reed.]
Some people cannot spell “Caesar” and some don’t know that “online” is written as one word.
Takes all sorts.
[Daphne – The fact that some people write on-line as one word does not mean it is any more correct than, say, ‘bwietz’ for boots. Popular usage does not make for correctness. If online were correct, then it stands to reason that offline would be, too. But it isn’t. If off-line is written in hyphenated form, then on-line should be, too.]
There is a lot of discussion going on of the evolution of the word on-line/online (and off-line/online, e-mail/email, Web/web etc) and whether it will be merged into one word or not. Many (including me) are of the opinion it should be one word, rather than hyphenated. The consensus at the time seems to be that both forms are accepted, granted they are used consistently. Now I don’t have a fraction of your linguistic skills, so all I can do is voice my opinion and go hide in a corner.
[Daphne – It has to be hyphenated, for the same reason that ‘straight-haired’ and ‘brown-skinned’ are hyphenated: a straight-haired woman, a brown-skinned man and an on-line article. Eventually, perhaps it will become one word, as some exceptions do – offshore and onshore. It will take years and might never happen. You’ll notice that neither offshore nor onshore is hyphenated, but there is no word ‘offline’, just off-line. Off-line and on-line work together, so you can’t have ‘online’ but then ‘off-line’.]
Thanks for the lesson. You know you might actually have convinced me to change. I suspect my resistance to writing “on-line” is due to being Swedish. In Sweden hardly anything is hyphenated or separated. If there are two words to be combined, they are always written as one word (there is actually good reason for this as our grammar can create some very weird sentences in cases where they are separated). The worst thing is that my Swedish is now atrocious, leaving me with the ability to speak two languages badly, and adding in the occasional Maltese words doesn’t really help.
@Daphne.
It has probably already changed, at least online, if not off-line. Googling the terms, (you need to search for +”e-mail” -email to get numbers for e-mail, as it would otherwise also include email) gets you the following:
email, 2.8billion hits, e-mail 2billion
online, 3.7billion, on-line 0.4 billion
offline 1.2billion, off-line 0.2 billion
Now, does popular usage make a language? If so its changed already.
[Daphne – Do you know why Maltese is the only European language in which radio is masculine and problem is feminine? That’s right: popular usage based on ignorance.]
@Daphne
Who said problem is feminine? [Daphne – It’s feminine only in Maltese, because of our simplistic rules which dictate that anything ending in ‘a’ is feminine. It should be masculine.] I’ve heard quite a few people, admittedly of an older generation, saying “dak il-problema”, but then you’d accuse them of being pro-Italian fascists. [Daphne – No, they’re correct. ‘Problema’ should be masculine not because of the corollary with Italian, but because it is a word of Greek origin, and masculine. For the same reason, radio is feminine, not masculine, except in the language of the uneducated Maltese. And the rest have to end up repeating the error lest it be thought that they are the ones who are mistaken.]
Having said that, at the risk of going down in a ball of flame, I think you’re conflating analogies. The email/e-mail debate is quite a bit different from the gender usage issue, which is more analagous to the bwietz thing.
As you said it takes years, but in the case of specialist or niche words, you have to factor in the years the word spends in that specific domain. Some of us having been working online for over 20 years. When I started I used to write computer programmes, but very soon it was programs. [Daphne – I know. I noticed that my son does the same thing. All it means is that you are using American English rather than British English, because American English dominates the field in which you work.] Is it correct or desirable? Maybe not, but it just is.
On the other hand, to demonstrate that it’s a Friday afternoon, I’ve carried out the same search restricted to specific web sites, British & American, technical and non-technical, and the results are:
London Times: email wins 421000 to 78000
Washington Post: e-mail wins 1090000 to 743000
So bizarrely, the British have taken to a simplifying change in spelling faster than the Americans. [Daphne – Not exactly, and forgive me for being anally retentive but words are my big thing. ‘Email’ is an entirely new noun: a new word coined for something that didn’t exist before. E-mail, on the other hand, is short for electronic mail and remains a truncated form of the adjective + noun, hence the hyphen. I use ’email’ because the idea that it is a new noun, rather than a truncated adjective+noun, appeals to me.]
But then if you make the same comparison with the electronic media:
CNN, email wins 1180000 to 544000
BBC, e-mail wins 462,000 to 64400
It’s the other way round.
Then the technical ones, tie and jacket companies, the grampaws:
Microsoft, e-mail wins 1180000 to 762000
IBM, e-mail wins 440000 to 263000
But the jeans and sneakers crowd, the cool (it the IT world) and modern ones:
Google, email wins 2700000 to 265000
Sun Microsystems, email wins 1950000 to 27800
And last but not least, in Malta:
The Times, email wins 54300 to 191
The Malta Independent, email wins 2610 to 740 – Mostly yours?
(I’m not going to bother with di-ve.com – they of “the department of economic riots”) [Daphne – What?]
And in total it’s 8140310 to 4087731 in favour of email, so I’m thinking we can say that apart from the fact that I should be spending less time at a keyboard (key-board?) email has pretty much made it as a word in its own right.
This is really lame, having a debate on online, email and offline.
Compound words anyone? <—
Sorry I meant any-one.
@Daphne
A couple of years ago someone was arrested for passing off fake money. According to di-ve.com, the branch of the police carrying out the investigation was “the department of economic riots” – ie Reati Ekonomici.
I think they or someone else were subsequently “condemned of all the accuses brought against them”.
Radio 101 or NET studio sign reading “ON THE AIR”.
John Schembri, I imagine that’s jargon commonly used in the industry. For example, a cybersquatter isn’t really a computer-age person who squats, but somebody who buys domain names and sells them for a profit.
Here’s another jealous one, Harry Purdie. This chap who lives a couple of floors below me was on stage when Hendrix was doing his closing act (appears at 2.43 and towards the end). Must have felt like walking on air (and probably was).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiEpiNJv3zI